I’m newly inspired, too. I had planned to start learning arabic around this next Christmas, but I think now I am inspired to attack both Arabic and German at the same time. I have to be in Paris from time to time and have plenty of opportunity to speak to Lebanese there - that is when I will have learned enough. As for German, Northern Italy hosts many, many Germans. When I visit Piemonte sometimes I find I am at a barbecue surrounded by German speakers (Germans, Austrians, Swiss) all seeking great wine and the language at dinner switches between Italian and German. So conversational German would be a great addition.
1 Like
I found German horrendously difficult! I tried ‘scientific German’ and realised I got on much better with ‘scientific Russian’, so did that!! I used ‘brot und cafe’ to find the dining car on a train, relaxed into French when it turned out the car belonged to Belgian Railways, and was a bit shocked to be addressed in Flemish by a steward who mistook my French accent… but that’s another story!! The point is that everything I learned naturally as a child had totally vanished by the time I next ‘met’ German!
1 Like
yes, flash-card vocabularies and grammatical rules - may someone ‘‘whizz’’ on them from a dizzy height!!
1 Like
That’s definitely what we’re aiming for 
I think Levels 1 to 3 will end up somewhere round about 750 words (by which stage, I would expect most learners to be engaging in conversations pretty confidently) - and then we’re hoping to build a set of dialogues that introduce new vocab in context - we’ve got quite a bit of testing to do to find out the right kind of pacing for that - but since we should by then have got people used to accelerated listening, we might be able to squeeze quite a bit of new vocab into just a few hours of listening…
If it turns out that the approach works, then I see no reason in principle why we wouldn’t be able to take it up to 3k or 4k before we move over to just producing stuff focusing more on dialects…
Thank you, Jeff, for your constructive comments.
Actually, your experience with German is a bit similar to mine with French. Many years ago I tried unsuccessfully to learn French, but gave up without having learnt anything at all (or so I thought). Years later, I came across the French CD I’d been using, and just for the hell of it, I played it. I was amazed to find how much I could remember - even better than when I’d been actively trying to learn it!
I haven’t made a decision yet on whether to go for the Dutch course or not, but I no doubt will fairly soon.
I’m dying to have a go at the 12 languages in 12 months! At the moment I’m trying to revise languages that I’ve learnt before (many years before!) and not used for ages. It would be soooo much better if I could revise them using SSi lessons. I’m having fun with some of the other programmes around, but not learning anywhere near as effectively.
1 Like
Well, I’m not sure I’m having as much fun as you with the other programs around so the essential question is - on what do we feed the SSi team so they can reach maximum revs and then we can all realize our dreams?!
1 Like
Interesting question. But putting that aside for the moment, I think that there are things we can do for ourselves to make our language learning more SSi-like (while we are waiting for the relevant SSix courses to come along.
Such as concentrating on listening and speaking in preference to reading and writing; spaced repetition; picking up grammar naturally as we go along and not being afraid to make mistakes.
For some languages, there are loads of podcasts out there, and some have free transcripts available (German and Spanish are two I know about).
Sometimes you can also get translations of the transcripts, but if not, for some languages Google or Bing translation of language X to English isn’t too bad (German and Spanish for example), so you can get a pretty good first approximation to the meaning anyway.
So, one approach could be:
- Download your podcast (hopefully not too long, and on subject matter that interests you).
- Listen to it all the way through; take it in short segments if it gets too much.
- If any words stand out for you for any reason, try to repeat them as accurately as possible, thus getting your tongue around the way that language works, which will be different from your own.
- Notice any “cognates” (lots in German and Spanish; also French; also German is structurally similar to English (with the exception of the verb going at the end in some circumstances and that it has “case endings”, but don’t worry about those in the beginning. The aim is to learn them naturally, SSi-style).)
- Now start to break it down into a few sentences at a time, or a short paragraph at a time. Listen to your selection over and over a few times, pronouncing some of the words, or all of it if you prefer.
- Then look at the Google/Bing translation for the particular sentences or paragraph. If it comes as no surprise, then hooray to you, but even if it is a surprise don’t worry. You can use an online dictionary to check specific words if you wish (e.g. wordreference.com has several languages; dict.cc or leo.org are good for German). But don’t spend too long on it.
- Move on to the next few sentences or paragraph and repeat.
- Keep going at your own pace until you finish the podcast (over several days if that’s what it takes. Try to repeat as many of the individual words or whole sentences as you can, making yourself aware of the overall meaning from the translation, without getting too hung up on it.
…
In keeping with the latest SSi thinking, don’t repeat any one podcast too soon, but find another, and just keep going.
That’s just one approach, and I’m sure there are others.
It may take a while to get into it, but once you do, try to do at least as much speaking as listening, even if you don’t fully understand what you are saying.
If anyone has a particular interest in German, feel free to PM me and I can give some more specific pointers.
Hwyl,
Mike